My eyes crossed: he had lost me. "Teraflop? Fall to earth?"

"Not quite. One teraflop equals exactly one trillion floatingpoint calculations per second. So you can see that this little baby is really in the big league. One thing that helps as well is the fact that all the memory is nanobased.

We have invented and patented a molecular nanomemory where rows of molecules are flipped one way or the other to record data. I will demonstrate. Do you have a database I can copy?"

"Far too much in one of them. In the computer, filed under KAIZI."

He hummed to himself as he connected the two computers and hit a button. There was a quick crackling sound and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted up. James peered at the screen and smiled.

"Done," he said. "And less than one-hundredth of one percent of the memory in this computer has been used. Now what do you want done with it?"

I told him about our encounter in the forest and Kaia's problems. He nodded understandingly and his fingers skipped over the keys. He smiled when I mentioned the daily transfer to my bank account, shook his head when I mentioned how easily my employer had found this same account.

"We will have to do something about that. Find a secure place for your hardearned income." He leaned back and cracked his knuckles while the screen before him flared and crackled. "I've started a search program, really a lot of search programs running at the same time in a neural network. But— we sure have a lot of material to search for. What I have done is I have tapped into the interstellar web. We are now recording every detail of every occurrence of any kind, in any city where a robbery took place. All of the details of activity before and after the time that one of the banks was robbed. Then comparisons of all the data will be made. Such as, let us say, a spacer with the same name left every one of these cities exactly one day after each of the robberies …"